Nouslife: In praise of Tyndale and perspectivising the KJV

23 August 2006

In praise of Tyndale and perspectivising the KJV

This is an interesting article to have handy for when you run into KJV fundies, going through the history of the English translation and so setting the matter in a wider context which somehow makes the issue fall into perspective. I especially chuckled over this:

James had a passionate dislike of the Geneva Bible because its marginal notes did not support the notion that the Bible upholds the divine right of kings, a doctrine James was passionate about

; it amused me because the home of KJV fundamentalism seems to be the USA, and I find it amusing that all those republicans defend a translation that in its origins functioned to attempt to outlaw the forces that gave rise to the the American republic. What a hoot! Doubly so as

various Puritans when they moved to America, did not bring a KJV with them. Their Bible of choice was the Geneva Bible.

Anyway, the producers

were not trying to be innovators, but nor were they mere copiers of earlier versions, particularly in spots where there had been advances in original language study. And they were only as good as the original language manuscripts they had would allow them to be.

In other words, they were updating in a conservative way using the best manuscripts then available. There's no sense of the divine providence of the Textus Receptus, it just happened to be the best they had at the time, and the process by which it might be regarded as the best is, in essence, the one which helps us to assess more recent MS discoveries. And one of the comments on the article has a nice addendum:

Ken Schenck said...
One of the most interesting (and most deconstructive) tidbits about the King James only debate is the fact that the KJV in current use is actually the fifth revision to update the language and dates from the late 1700's. So by using this fifth update of the 1611 version, a person implicitly acknowledges the validity of updating the language over time... which of course deconstructs the KJV only argument in its most virulent form.

Interestingly to the dialectician in me,

considering where the universities were in England, and taking into account Tyndale’s own Oxford pedigree, the English that we find in the King James is basically the English of southeastern England,

This is why all those '-eth' endings for third person singular verbs; if they'd used a northern dialect we'd have had the form that won the dialectal battle: '-[e]s'.

It also had some unexpected pleasures for me. I focused more on Wycliffe when we studied the English reformation, so I didn't really recall this info about William Tyndale. I had forgotten how influential he was on English language.

It was Tyndale who came up with the hybrid term Jehovah which combines two different Hebrew names for God. He invented the English word Passover for the Hebrew pesah. It is also to Tyndale that we owe the use of terms like scapegoat and atonement to translate Hebrew terms that had no good direct English equivalents.